


A Life Lost, Remembered Only As a Skull

by greenmaskedmarauder94



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen, It's also kinda angsty and I'm sorry for that, just a little study on everyone's favorite ghost, secret santa gift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28327506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenmaskedmarauder94/pseuds/greenmaskedmarauder94
Summary: everything Skull can remember about his afterlife. A lot of it involves pestering Lucy. That's why we love him.
Kudos: 13





	A Life Lost, Remembered Only As a Skull

**Author's Note:**

> This is my Secret Santa gift for Clem/Amelie of the Lockwood and Co server! Enjoy!

He forgot everything, except how he chose to live his last months in life. No name, no family, no birthday. Only cruel work for a cruel man, during some of the cruelest months of the year, and finally a cruel end. Barefoot, cold, and alone, his death was final and brief and painful. No redo, just a desire of the soul to come back. But he didn’t come back right. 

The first few years after coming back were lonely. He felt alive, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t ask an adult for help, he couldn’t eat his favorite meals anymore. And no one could hear him. Few people could see him, but no matter how loud he screamed, no one could hear him.

He was also confined by his attachment. He returned every day back to where he was killed, and sat alone next to a head that was slowly changing to a skull. He was unable to look after any of his remaining family. Did he even have family left? Or had he always been alone and forgotten?

He tried so hard to become alive again, and so he consumed the living. He hoped it would help but it only worked for a few minutes, and then...nothing. The power of life flowed through him and then left him as quickly as it arrived. He tried this without any further success only a few times more.

The skull that held him to the world changed from white bone to moldering brown bone. Days grew into months that grew into years as he lost track of how long he was coming back each night. Still no one could hear him speak.

More time passed, and suddenly he was moved, uprooted, and his skull placed into a jar. His spirit could no longer move about freely, and instead was squashed tightly into the jar. Days passed as the strangers who took him kept him on a shelf in a lab, conducting odd experiments. He only caught some of their words, words like “Fittes” and “agents” and also “ghost hunters.” While he was alone, he discovered that his spirit stayed during the day as well as during the night. 

He discovered that because the jar compressed his spirit, he could pass time by forming shapes within it. The shocked faces of the people in strange coats who had stolen him from his previous location entertained him more than his countless days of screaming at people who could not hear him.

After an indeterminate time, a strange woman joined the strange men in strange coats. She felt different than anyone else, and eyed him as he sat in his jar. She spoke with the men, then, to his surprise, she spoke with him.

From conversations he’d overheard between the men, he learned that they called his spirit, or at least the stuff he could form shapes with, ectoplasm. The woman asked him about this, and several other things about being dead. At first he did not respond, but then he spoke back to her. She was unsurprised about him being able to speak. None of the men could hear him at all.

“So it is a Type Three then?” one of them asked the woman.

“Yes, though he isn’t much help. I already knew all he was telling me. Finish whatever experiments you have to do on him, and then do what you want. Destroy him, store him away. He is of no use to me.”

“Yes, Marissa,” he replied, and then the strange woman they called Marissa walked away.

They finished their “experiments” that didn’t do anything to him at all, and then he spent more lost time locked away in a cupboard, next to several other trapped spirits. He tried his best to communicate with them, but they did not appear to be as sentient as he was.

After an unknown time later, he was taken out with several other of the trapped spirits, termed “sources” by these strange men, and put onto a cart. He overheard one of the men say that the spirits there were all to be destroyed. He resigned himself to the fact that he would be destroyed forever when the man wheeling the cart stepped away to sign papers for someone in a grey uniform. A young boy came past, wearing that same grey uniform but incredibly crumpled. He was holding a box with no top, carrying it away from what must have been his desk. He chanced a glance at the unattended cart, and whisked away his jar.

“Now, George, I hope you understand that we here at Fittes have certain expectations for our operatives. It is clear to me that you do not meet any of them.” A woman wearing a much crisper grey uniform that was ordained in several pins and medals was scolding the crumpled boy as she escorted him out. He heard the boy grunt in response, and then he was carted out of that large building in a box of unorganized papers and knick knacks, hidden under a horrid brown sweater.

A shorter time passed, and the boy joined up with another boy, a tall and lean, dark haired boy. They must have been working together, because soon he was placed in a room with other random sources. Another unremarkable boy joined them, but he did not stay for long.

After the unremarkable boy left, he had been shown to several different young girls, each more squeamish and scared than the last. One finally left with a scream. Then there came someone special, he could tell. She felt more powerful than any of the others. While she appeared shocked at his appearance, she did not leave or faint. Instead, she leaned closer and inspected him.

He attempted communication with this girl, but she couldn’t hear him. He thought he might have been wrong about her power, but he felt certain he was right. Over time, he learned her name. Lucy. Finally, he got his chance after she knocked over his jar. She heard him after the lever got turned, and gave her a warning from what he had picked up while being kept at Fittes: “Death’s in life and life’s in death, and what was fixed is fluid….” she turned his lever before he could finish.

Well, after that, she spoke to George and that other one, Lockwood, and told them what happened. However he was too cross to speak again. Time passed again and they worked on something that stirred his forgotten time with his cruel master, Dr. Bickerstaff. He gave them clues, but also thwarted them with taunts and jokes. He was, after all, a ghost. He had to have  _ some _ fun.

After the close of that case, much to the discomfort of Lucy, George and Lockwood had him tag along on cases to help out. He developed a fondness for Lucy, not that she would ever know. She slowly began to trust him, and he constantly asked her to release him again. She refused, of course, but she did provide him with regular conversation.

Another girl joined Lockwood and Co, and he knew that she was there to ruin things. At the very least, she made Lucy more tense, and that was  _ his _ job! They continued cases, but the new girl, Holly, did not know about him. At least, not at first. There was a disastrous case that Lucy had to tell her about the fact that he was a Type Three and she could speak to him. They appeared to briefly patch up, but he didn’t stop suggesting ways that she could use to kill her.

The disastrous case briefly separated him from Lucy but then they came together again. She seemed shaken but he so didn’t care about that. She asked him a question about ghosts, and while he could tell she was being serious, he didn’t feel like it. So he gave her some round about answers that didn’t help but made him feel better. 

After that, Lucy ended up leaving and took him with her. They worked on cases together, and went back to a sad looking room. He spent more time avoiding her questions about death and what happens after. Really, he just enjoyed that he was still there to annoy her.

After some time of just being on their own, Lockwood came back to ask Lucy to join him on a case. She ended up agreeing, and after giving her the silent treatment all night, he eventually decided to help as well. The morning after that case, someone broke into Lucy’s room and took him. They whisked him away and he was placed with some unassuming looking man, along with a lot of other powerful sources, including the one from the case with Lockwood, and a different one that he’d helped Lucy find the week before. After a few days of being with the stranger, Lucy showed up and attempted a rescue, but the same thugs that took him took him again, and then he was whisked off to some random place in the country.

He hated to admit it, even to himself, but he was upset. Without Lucy, there was no chance of communication anymore. It would be just like before, when he had been free and trying to live while being dead. And the other captured spirits were useless. No possibility of conversation at all. And whatever they intended on using him for, they couldn’t. The lid to his jar was stuck. There was no chance of him even being free, he was just cast aside.

Somehow, Lucy and Lockwood managed to find their way to him again anyway. He couldn’t believe it, those idiots had actually managed to rescue him. Well, not really. They found him, but then Lucy was separated again, having to dart into a circle of all the other horrid ghosts in order to escape the people who took him. Or, so she thought. 

He concentrated on the other area of the world that was always open to him as a ghost, but that he could not explore because he was dead. He knew that they had ventured off and through the other side, and was waiting when they finally figured out where they were and tried to come back. Typically, he had to save their skins.

After Lucy finally rescued him for real, she locked him in a storage cupboard. He was miffed about that, but he had to ask her about her experience, and finally get her to understand the message he first tried to convey to her. After they destroyed everything, Lockwood and Lucy and the rest of them finally returned to London, taking him back with. They were visited by Marissa Fittes, though they called her Penelope, in the middle of their breakfast where they discussed the events of what had happened at the lab in that dinky small town. He had to admit, he was shocked to see Marissa still alive. After Marissa left, he broke the news to Lucy about who she was. Of course, she didn’t trust him enough and they launched their own investigation into the whole ordeal.

Meanwhile, they worked on other cases together to disguise their efforts. He overheard all their talk about changes to how agencies could do things, especially small ones like theirs. Still, they managed to be smart about the whole thing. George had been gathering all his information, and he presented all the facts to them, though he had more information than he thought was necessary. Why couldn’t they all just take his word for it?

Shortly after all this information was presented, George ended up getting attacked. Lucy was upset, so out of self-preservation, he was silent all the while. After he was brought back home, the idiots decided to conduct a raid on a club of old people to get information. It was boring him to bits up until they all decided to fight the geriatrics in their house. Best bit of entertainment he’d had in all his afterlife.

Only days after that, they were the ones attacked in their homes. Lucy was too stubborn to release him even though he had offered to help them out! As a result, they ended up getting trapped on the other side, and having to walk to the place they figured they could get back. He berated her for her stubbornness, and then was taken by the attackers. He ended up having to wait a full day (he watched the clock to keep track) before they showed up again.

Everyone else was shocked when they could all hear him, not just Lucy. Lockwood tried to be an upstart and ask questions of him himself, but he put his foot down and would only talk to Lucy. That was, after all, how it should be. He lost track again of what happened after their talk, Kipps was hurt he thought. And then they had some crazy plan to get out. It worked for a while, but Lucy ended up separated from the group, with only him for help. She confronted Marissa on her own, and was doing really well, until it was discovered that he’d been off a bit about who she was. She was apparently both Penelope and Marissa, and that spooked even him, an evil ghost.

Marissa made Lucy an offer, featuring her own powerful Type Three, but Lucy was of course smarter than this crazy woman, and so she refused and fought her. But she ended up injured in the process. She attempted to free him, but either she was too weak or the glass too thick because she couldn’t break it. He teased her about that, he couldn’t believe that this was how he was going to watch the end.

Then Lockwood showed up. And Lucy didn’t need him anymore. After Lucy explained everything to him, she freed him anyway. He was content to watch the final battle, up until Marissa revealed just how crazy she was. He begrudgingly saved them both, and in doing so, sacrificed his own ties to their world.

He moved on. He went to the other side, and watched their progress from there. He could see that it was all going to be ok, and Lucy even rescued the source he no longer wanted from the rubble. He would go see whatever was next.

Oh. These idiots. They were going to make him come back anyway, because they obviously couldn’t do anything without him, including get together. Well, fine. He could go back to an afterlife attached to a skull, if only because someone had to remind them all to live properly.


End file.
